Jenufa (ENO, 25 June)

Suspension of disbelief is the opera-goer's best friend, and a persistent problem when it fails to work out. Here, it was a male lead, lusted after by all onstage, who nevertheless looked like Guy Fieri and bounced around like Tigger. I'm also still not convinced by opera sung in English, although there were moments where I felt myself--I mean, it couldn't have been--but maybe liking the immediacy this granted.

This was a bit of a laundry-list of stuff I've seen elsewhere in London opera and am now getting sick of. Our opera designers are at the moment still besotted with GDR-ish, somewhere-in-the-Eastern-Bloc settings. In the past year alone I've seen an ROH Flying Dutchman (where it worked), a kinda-sorta ROH Tannhäuser (where it didn't work at all)--and of course that Carmen set in a Bulgarian fish-gutting plant. (I might have made one of those up.)

I'm not saying opera needs to be sumptuous, or even necessarily staged on a set not visibly giving the singers mesothelioma. I'm wondering however if London's designers went en masse to the same three Berlin productions somewhere around the milennium and never got over the thrill of seeing opera sung in shitty sweaters and coveralls. Were there not even a few years, under Communism, when there was paint? This was maybe the grimmest series of sets I've seen at a professional production in London, with the highlight the arc of peeling wallpaper that dominated the second and third acts; in the thrilling first act, the designers went all-out by placing both a table and a small booth on a slightly different set. Around the vast stage of the Coliseum, I assume whoever was in charge told the singers simply to ACT--I remember particularly the lead kind of shaking her firsts against the brightly-lit white backdrop, as though willing actual sets to come into existence. For much of the opera the singers sort of waggled themselves about in space.

Speaking of waggling: could I request a six-month moratorium for mimed copulation--for, forgive me, dry-humping--on opera stages? Or maybe limit it to special performances for the subtext-challenged? This happens everywhere now, as directors indicate that operas mean sex when they mention sex. At the Harlot's Progress in Vienna a few years back a few enthusiasts were humping a coffin; nothing that egregious happens here. But Jenufa is, after all, an opera in which the lead delivers a child between acts one and two. I of course thank the designer for bringing to our attention that this happened through sexual intercourse, but might have liked piecing together the details myself.

With all of that said: a dreary first and second act were redeemed by a genuinely thrilling third, as vast chilly apartment set is broken up by an infanticide-maddened mob. The decision to break that big, crappy set open to let this mob storm in seemed to genuinely menace the main characters, whose isolation at the corners of the set in the previous act was brought into stark relief. Everyone sung beautifully, despite the occasionally banal English libretto. This really hammered home to me how opera could be a popular form. Good for the ENO risking terrible attendance to put this on.